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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Mark Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on June 5, 1952. He earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1976. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande Books, 2011); Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007); To the Green Man (Sarabande Books, 2004); Unholy Sonnets (Story Line Press, 2000); Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Iris (Story Line Press, 1992); The Black Riviera (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which won the 1991 Poets' Prize; Far and Away (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1985); The Rote Walker (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1981); and North Sea (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978).

Jarman served as Elector for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine form 2009-2012. During the 1980s, he and Robert McDowell founded, edited, and published the Reaper, a magazine that helped established the movements of New Narrative and New Formalism. Selections from the magazine were published in book form as the Reaper Essays (Story Line Press, 1996). Jarman has published two collections of essays: Body and Soul (University of Michigan Press, 2002) and the Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001). He is also coeditor with David Mason of Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (Story Line Press, 1996).

The poet Edward Hirsch described Jarman's poetry as "God-haunted. [Jarman] writes as an unorthodox but essentially Christian poet who embraces paradox and treats contradiction, to use Simone Weil's phrase, as a lever for transcendence."

Jarman's awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2011, he received the Balcones Poetry Prize for Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, the soprano Amy Jarman.

Body and Soul (University of Michigan Press, 2002)The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001)Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, coedited with David Mason (Story Line Press, 1996)The Reaper Essays, coedited with Robert McDowell (Story Line Press, 1996)

Then Saw the Problem

Mark Jarman, 1952

How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a lifetime to construct that airport.

Mark Jarman

by this poet

Black Phoebe
Highwayman of the air, coal-headed, darting
Plunderer of gnat hordes, lasso with beak –
"Surely, that fellow creature on the wing,"
The phoebe thinks, "should fly like this."
And loops
His flight path in a wiry noose, takes wing
Like a cast line and hits the living fly

To raise a stump of rock into a tower, rolling a stone
in place as the years pass.
Strangers who only know your silhouette bid it farewell and
travel to Japan,
Cross China, venture into India, to Europe, and, changed
by time and space,
Sail home over the bulging eye of ocean only to see, when

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How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a

How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a

How do you turn into a flower of the field,
the lily clothed to make Solomon rue his glory?
What leap takes off from here towards evolution,
pointing the way to the pearly everlasting?
Eons made the flower and flowers have their agendas,
whatever the population of the field—
more than a